Toward a Fault-Tolerance Framework for COTS Many-Core Systems

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) many-core processors offer the performance needed for computational-intensive safety-critical real-time applications such as autonomous driving. However, these consumer-grade many-core processors are increasingly susceptible to faults because of their highly integrated design. In this paper, we present a fault-tolerance framework that eases the usage of COTS many-core processors for safety-critical applications. Our framework employs an adaptable software-based fault-tolerance mechanism that combines N Modular Redundancy (NMR) with a repair process and a rejuvenating round robin voting scheme. A Stochastic Activity Network (SAN) model of the fault-tolerance mechanism allows the framework to adapt the parameters of the mechanism such that a specified target availability is achieved with minimum overhead. Experiments on a cycle-accurate simulator empirically prove the correctness of the SAN model and evaluate the overhead of the framework.